Sennheiser is a company that many of you will associate right away with quality headphones and microphones. Big headphone listeners like myself might have even owned a handful of Sennheiser products over the years. When Phonebloks and Project Ara emerged some time ago Sennheiser came forward and said that they’d work on a module for the new smartphone that would eventually launch with a modular design. Now, the company has an update of sorts on the sort of module that would be created by Sennheiser for use a Project Ara smartphone, with a new model dubbed Proteus.

Proteus is a concept put together by an R&D team in one of Sennheiser’s San Francisco offices and Lance Reichart, a Design Engineer has shared a recent update with the community on YouTube. Talking about the new Proteus design, which follows in the footsteps of the original Amphion amp, it was clear that the community wanted more ‘oomph’ from their smartphones. As such, they designed the Proteus with a high-end DSP and a 150mW headphone amplifier to deliver high-quality sound from a module designed to deliver quality sound. They quickly realized that a module with two jacks would be great as you could share music with friends from one device as well as further expand the device’s capabilities when recording audio.

This is again, another concept, but it’s one that’s rooted in science and wouldn’t be too difficult for a company like Sennheiser to put into production. I know that I’d like a better output from my smartphone as I often use some sort of headphone amp while listening to music. Of course, all of this is a long way off still, but progress like this is great to see and it sure looks like Google is serious about delivering a real product sooner rather than later. Would you like a device where you could add another module to improve the audio experience? I know I would.